I have been a member of the Cedar Mountain Garden Club since 1995, a relative newcomer compared to some of the members having been with the club since the start in 1957. When I became the President in 2002 I noticed how all the various materials, books, program booklets, photos, etc were being held by different members both past and present. Each time new officers and committee chairpeople were put into office, these materials had to be redistributed. After my first meeting as President in September (2002), I proposed to the Officers the idea of creating a digital library web site to help organize, collect and archive some of the organizations material. I told them I would develop a test site and if they liked it I would present it to the entire club.
I will start to ask different members to help collect and select what will be put into the library, so this will be an on going project. I have started with the two years I was President and will add materials for each new year. I would like to start collecting items from the past. Photos will need to be researched and permission to use them will need to be secured. We will need to find old flyers and program booklets.
Hardware Used
HP ScanJet 5300C was used to scan and digitize all the photos, flyer, books and program booklet cover
Computer used PC Cyrixinstead 233 Mhz, 96 MB Ram, Windows 98 Second Edition
Software Used
Yahoo GeoCities Pro Page Builder was used to create the webpages
Adobe Photo Deluxe was used to worked with all the scanned materials
Acrobat 4.0 was used to create the PFD file
Future of this Project
I will continue to work with Cedar Mountain Garden Club to collect and organize the materials that are selected to be in this digital library web site. I will continue to be the webmaster for them and hope to be able to have at least the last 10 years worth of materials digitized and posted to this library. We will need to find all the different materials and secure permission to use the items from the different members both past and present. I will need to eventually make the archive pages into different pages, possible one for just photos, one for just the flyers and one for just the program booklets. I have added an archive page for the Club's newsletters and will continue to add each months newsletters in PDF form.
I chose to use Pro Page Builder which creates a site with no adversiting, but we did use FreeFind for our search engine which does include some adversiting. We will see how this search engine works with our library. We may decide to go with a adversiting-free search engine in the future. I may at sometime in the future recreate this site using Dreamweaver software which, will allow me more freedom with design.